Archive for Treats Training

Dashwood is a puppy and hence he sleeps most of the day. He sleeps wherever I am, by my feet. It is because he is also a dog and as a pack animal, in the wild, he would never be on his own. Dogs in a human society need to learn from an early age how to cope with being on their own. This is what dog psychologists call “Separation Anxiety”.

Crates help puppies to learn that being left alone is fine and that someone will return soon. Puppies learn that they cannot follow you everywhere you go when they are left in a crate, and that you come back as if nothing has happened and let them out. You can gradually increase the time your puppy is left in the crate a minute at a time to start with. Remember only to let your puppy out of the crate if they are quiet.

I started leaving Dashwood by himself in our big open plan kitchen when he was about 12 weeks. Little by little he started being used to it. When I came back to the house I made sure I gave him lots of treats to reward him for having been such good puppy, not broken anything or chewed stuff. Giving him treats is also an incentive for him as he associates that when I leave, as soon as I return is “Treat Fest”.

Teaching a puppy where to pee and poo is like training chimpanzees for the circus. It’s all about the food treats. In the case of puppies Cheddar is the substance to abuse.

So the pee mat is by the garden door which is shut because it is early March and this is England and outside is as cold as @ w*tch’s t*t. So puppy, who pees right after every meal – this is when Robocop Mum begins to makes sense of the behavioural data, some times gets it right, because he happens to sniff around the pee mat and smells his previous pee of the day and so relieves himself on the same spot. At that precise moment, the Cheese Fest begins.

One has to drop anything that one was doing and one has to start repeating over and over what a “Goood Puppy” one’s puppy is, like only a cheerleading Mummy would, as one proceeds to go towards the fridge and get the cheese box out and choose a nice chunck of cheese, put it on a board, and chop tiny bits of cheese that your puppy, by now glued to your leg, will wallop, and wallop, one after the other. This is what behavioural psychologists call “Reward”. Puppy starts to associate that peeing on the mat gets him cheese, and so he kind of remembers to look for the mat as much as he can.

Still, nature is more powerful than cheese, and we already know that there are a couple of spots that, having peed there before, puppy goes back and does his thing thinking all is dandy. When puppies wee on the wrong spot, you just pick it up and make no fuss of it. This is done so that when the pee is on the mat, and you throw that 14th Julliet racket, the puppy kind of gets that something awesome must be going on with you.

Either that, or he probably thinks that cheese makes you as nuts as it does to him and a cheese party is a Mad Hatter Non-Birthday celebration to keep in the eccentric non-British family that we are.